


Hollow Places

by eyra



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Eventual Romance, Forests, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magic, Magical Realism, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Midsummer, Modern Era, Mythology References, Paganism, Tea, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:47:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29436303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eyra/pseuds/eyra
Summary: This is ridiculous. Houses don't jump around merrily on maps. Paths don't change spontaneously of their own accord the moment you walk down them. Owls don't scowl at innocent passers-by with genuine, human disdain, but the great tawny owl perched on a bare branch a few paces ahead is doing just that, and actually, Sirius thinks, owls shouldn't be around in the daytime at all - disdainful ones or otherwise - and truly nothing about this cursed place is acceptable.Sirius finds himself in the woods, in a cottage, sipping strawberry-pink tea from a chipped china teacup. Remus has dirt under his fingernails and isn't going anywhere.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 53
Kudos: 103





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this an age ago and suddenly felt a calling to go back to it. We're in the woods again, but this time there's magic and chaos and blackbirds that Sirius suspects are up to something. And plenty of tea, as ever. 
> 
> I like this one - hope you do too! x

In hindsight, it had been the wrong choice of footwear entirely.

Sirius tries not to wince as the soles of his polished brogues make contact once again with some sort of animal dropping he’d rather not spend any amount of time thinking about. He really had thought this would be easier: park the company car up in a convenient, well-maintained car park, and then a smart walk up a tarmac path to the house. A quick chat with the owner, a signature on the dotted line, and back in London in time for lunch.

It was, Sirius realises now, a fool’s errand, and he detests his father more with each uneven step through the undergrowth as he curses him for sending him out on this assignment. He hadn't even been the firm's first choice: some junior employee had been sent out on Sirius's instruction weeks ago but had got a flat tyre half a mile from the edge of the forest and never made it, which had ended in him being summarily dismissed by their Head of Operations caught in a bad mood one morning. Another worker from Finance had come out a fortnight later but had turned back at the last minute, citing a call from Legal that had apparently instructed him not to go on as the plans had changed; a week-long investigation into the source of the errant information had followed, with no one being any wiser by the end of it and the whole thing had been written off as a prank by some team or other, by which point Orion had lost all patience and, in his ire, had bellowed at Sirius to do the job himself.

"Just get the signature, Sirius," Orion had snapped at him over dinner last weekend. "It's not difficult."

"But why do _I_ have to go?" he'd whined. It all sounded odious; some vast patch of land out in the middle of nowhere, entirely uninhabited save for one solitary dwelling that was preventing the company from taking over the whole lot and letting a client run a private road right through the middle of it, ripe for development and an industrial park and whatever else was going to make the investors lots of capital. All rather ugly, when Sirius thought about it, which he tended not to do because it tended to send him into an existential spiral that required James and, usually, a large bottle of whisky to give him any chance of clawing his way back out. But it was where he was, and he did what he did, and although Sirius couldn't say with any degree of conviction that being a legal attack dog for the family business was bringing him anything even approaching job satisfaction, he truly has never been able to come up with an alternative.

Which is how he finds himself now, standing quite literally at a crossroads, staring dumbly at the map on his phone and wondering how on earth he could've managed to lose a house when it's quite clearly there, right there, at the edge of the forest.

Except, it's not. It was; he’s sure it was. But it's not anymore, and Sirius huffs out an incredulous, disbelieving laugh as he finds the plot is actually marked on his map much deeper into the woods; far off the beaten track, nestled on a promontory jutting out into a river, or stream. 

"I'm going insane."

He rubs his eyes, and looks at the map again, and then up at the path forking ahead of him. It looks like he should take the left fork; it looks, on the map, like the left fork should lead him back out towards the western edge of the forest, over a small brook, and then straight up to the house approach. But that's what he thought last time, when he turned left at the broken tree stump and got his pea coat caught on a low, prickly branch that put a hole right through the wool, and it still doesn't look as if he's any closer to reaching the godforsaken place.

"This is ridiculous," he mutters airily to himself, stuffing his phone back into his pocket and striding off down the left fork of the path. The forest is a horrible place; never one for being out in nature as it is, Sirius finds this particular forest exceptionally objectionable, and thinks, actually, maybe it will be a damn sight more pleasant with a good stretch of tarmac running through it. He kicks a small rock in frustration and scowls when it ricochets off a tree and propels itself right back at him, hitting him sharply in his shinbone.

"Awful, _awful_ place," he spits, and looks up ahead, and sees the path forking again. Which it absolutely isn't supposed to be doing. Shaking his head in despair, he pulls his phone back out and opens up his map, and sees that he's apparently now much too far east, as if he'd taken the right-hand fork rather than the left, and now the house isn't sitting on a promontory at all but rather tucked deep in a copse of trees, a stone's throw from a stretch of path Sirius walked down a good half hour ago. 

Sirius stops, and closes his eyes, and takes a slow, bracing breath through his nose, and tries to recall precisely how many glasses of wine he had with James last night, because this is _ridiculous_. Houses don't jump around merrily on maps. Paths don't change spontaneously of their own accord the moment you walk down them. Owls don't scowl at innocent passers-by with genuine, human disdain, but the great tawny owl perched on a bare branch a few paces ahead is doing just that, and actually, Sirius thinks, owls shouldn't be around in the daytime at all - disdainful ones or otherwise - and truly nothing - _nothing_ \- about this cursed place is acceptable.

He scowls right back at the bird as he rams his phone into his pocket, and then sets off, and finds himself back at a crossroads, and the map has changed again, and again, and again, and that _bloody_ owl is still following him, and then, rather than feeling the sheer, abject dread that probably should come with finding that one's phone battery is now entirely flat when one is comprehensively lost in the middle of an unfamiliar, ever-changing forest, Sirius instead finds some measure of peace in knowing that at least the map can't trick him again, and it's with a sort of wilful madness that he sets off blindly back into the undergrowth, following his nose, or his instincts, or something.

And it works. He rounds a corner, hops over a small beck, and there it is: the house, as promised, several hours later and at the gut-wrenching expense of Sirius's brogues, smartest wool coat, and, possibly, sanity. It's a crumbling, ramshackle old thing, all broken chimney pots and moss growing over the roof tiles; ferns and tiny, white-capped mushrooms sprouting up through the cracks. There's a window facing out over a small garden, tangled green weeds and wildflowers in a patchwork of colour, climbing the walls and winding in tapestry patterns around the leaded glass panes. It looks more ancient than the forest itself, and Sirius - to his surprise - now feels mildly sick at the thought of turfing out the little old lady who lives inside and bulldozing a road through the place. 

He straightens himself and walks purposefully down the overgrown path, adjusting his shirt collar as he raps smartly on the wooden door. It swings open almost immediately, and Sirius blinks in surprise at the face looking out at him across the threshold.

"You made it."

Not a little old lady, then. It's a man; a young man, Sirius's age or thereabouts, but a head or so shorter. He's a blur of freckles and soft, brown curls, full lips and a jagged, white scar darting across one cheek like lightning. 

"You... were expecting me?" Sirius hedges uncertainly. There's a crow perched in the rusted guttering above them; Sirius swears it's looking at him funny.

"You'd better come in," the man sighs. He's frowning out at Sirius as if there's some great cosmic puzzle that Sirius isn't seeing and the other man can't unravel. The crow's probably in on it too, Sirius thinks wildly, as he steps across the threshold and into the house.

"It's, erm. It's quite a walk here, isn't it?"

The other man nods, brow still pinched in scrutiny, and he pushes the heavy wooden door shut behind them. "It can be," he says, and Sirius has no idea what that means. "Tea?" the man sighs wearily.

"Thank you," mutters Sirius, and the man wanders off further into the house, down a narrow corridor flanked by walls of dark timber, every space taken up by drawings and sketches in wooden frames, herbs hanging from the ceiling in spriggy bunches and a long, uneven shelf covered in books and papers and jars that Sirius can't make out the contents of. To his left, a doorway leads through to a bright, busy sitting room, and Sirius ducks to mind his head on the low ceiling as he takes in the patchwork sofa, tattered and worn, and end tables topped with more glassware and papers. There's an ancient piano with broken keys pushed up against the far wall, its top decked with half-burnt-out candles, wax running down their brass holders in rivulets and webs, and then the room leads through to a wide, cluttered kitchen, the man from the doorway tinkering in the corner with china cups and an old, brass kettle.

"Did you get our letters?" Sirius says hesitantly, pausing beside a scrubbed wooden table in the middle of the room covered in sketches and torn-up lists and what looks like a map of the forest. There's a scattering of earth strewn over the faded paper.

"No," the man says airily, then turns to offer over a cup of something that Sirius doesn't think is tea. He smiles politely and takes it anyway.

"Right," Sirius nods, and curses Orion again for sending him to this ungodly place as he mentally prepares his sales pitch. "Well, my name is Sirius Black, and I represent Black Industries," he says, clearing his throat and feeling a horrible gnawing in his stomach as the man watches him coolly from across the kitchen. "And I've come to talk to-"

"I know who you are," the man cuts him off, folding his arms across his chest, sleeves of his cotton shirt rolled up to his elbows. His voice is some curious meeting of gentility and absolute, unbreachable strength, with an accent from nowhere and everywhere all at once. "I know why you're here."

"Right," Sirius says again, and takes a sip of his drink. It's strong and bitter; herbal in a way that makes Sirius's nose wrinkle in distaste.

"I imagine you have some papers you'd like me to sign?"

Sirius blinks across at the man in surprise.

"That's right," he says dumbly, not quite daring to believe that it might be that easy after such a hellish journey here. "I just need a signature, and then I can be on my way."

"Okay," the man nods, arms still folded across his chest, and Sirius sets his cup down atop the scattered maps on the kitchen table to reach into his jacket in search of the thick wadded envelope in his inside pocket. His fingers scrabble at the material where the envelope ought to be - where the envelope definitely was when he stepped out of the car - and he feels a surge of despair creep back up on him when he finds the pocket empty save for a pen, his car keys, and an old tissue.

"It's here somewhere," he mutters, patting the other pockets of his coat, and then the back pockets of his trousers and then, for good measure, his inside pocket again. All empty, or thereabouts, and he stares stupidly across the room, half-expecting to see the papers in the man's hands already, as if he might've performed some cruel sleight of hand when he passed Sirius his tea.

"Not there?" the man simply says, and now Sirius fancies he can see a small quirk of a smile pulling at his lips. He feels mad.

"I definitely..." he mutters, still scrabbling inside his pocket futilely, then sighs and takes a deep, bracing breath. "No matter," he says smartly, offering the man a tight smile. "I have them on my phone. Do you have a printer?"

The man looks across at him, leaning back against the counter and crossing one foot casually over the other. "No," he says lightly, which - Sirius thinks - he should've seen coming, because he's not entirely sure the house even has electricity, never mind Wi-Fi, and then: "And I think your phone might be dead, anyway."

Sirius blinks dumbly at him.

"Maybe you should come back another day," the man goes on, and he's definitely smiling now. "With your papers."

The thought of trekking through the forest again next week makes Sirius want to throw himself off a cliff. But then Orion is there over dinner, scolding him and shaking his head in abject disappointment, and Sirius grits his teeth and nods.

"Right," he says, buttoning his ruined coat back up and straightening himself up. "I'll do that."

"You do that," the man says, and Sirius finds him utterly, suddenly infuriating. "Thanks for dropping by."

Sirius knows he's being watched as he walks back down the garden path moments later, tea still bitter on his tongue, and he glances over his shoulder to see the man standing in the doorway of the house, arms folded across his chest again as he leans easily against the doorframe and nods to Sirius with a small, maddening smile, and Sirius scowls at him before stuffing his hands into his coat pocket and trudging back through the treeline. How impossible, Sirius thinks crossly; how infuriating and impossible that man had been, with his smirks and his arrogance and his horrible tea, and Sirius loses himself to his temper long enough to kick out again at an errant stone at the edge of the path, furious with himself and the forest and his father at the prospect of having to make this horrendous journey again. The stone sails off down the trail, and Sirius looks up with a jolt when he hears it connect with something with a loud, metallic clank. 

It's the car.

It's his car, parked up there at the edge of his makeshift car park just as he'd left it. But it can't have been more than ten minutes since he left the house, and it took him _hours_ to find it, and he feels a cold grip of panic seize the back of his neck as he wheels around and blinks dumbly back down the path into the forest. It looks innocent enough; the same trees and shrubs opening up at the mouth of the trail to the expanse of the same patch of gravel he'd parked up in that morning, and Sirius can only shake his head in disbelief as he runs an exhausted hand over his eyes and pulls his keys from his pocket. He leans his head against the steering wheel when he clambers into the car, taking a deep, steadying breath, and vows to himself to get an early night. And maybe swear off drinking for a while.

***

It's a week before he makes it back to the forest. Between Orion, catching up on paperwork from his day spent wandering in the woods, and a dispiriting blind date courtesy of James on the Tuesday, he finds himself in, if anything, an even darker mood than he'd been when he first set foot in the place seven days ago. He parks up on the same patch of gravel, and checks his pocket for the fourth time that morning, and finds the thick wadded envelope securely there beside his pen and his fully-charged phone, and he nods firmly to himself in the knowledge that after today he won't have to see this forest or that house or the maddening man inside ever again.

He foregoes the map on his phone in favour of his certainty that last week, all he had to do was walk from the house and keep a straight path forwards to find the entrance to the forest; no turnings, no forks in the road, just straight ahead, following his feet. The path opens up just like he remembers it, tall pines lining the avenue deeper into the woods, and as he makes his way in he takes solace in the fact that nothing seems to have changed at all. No forks have appeared in the track; no crossroads jumping from east to west, no trees realigning themselves when he turns his head, and it's not until he has a hundred paces or so under his belt that he notices it. Something _has_ changed, and it takes him a few moments more to pinpoint what it is. It's the air; there's something in the air that wasn't there before, and the further he walks, the more apparent it becomes.

It's smoke. Not from the forest, as if the trees or the very earth itself is on fire; it's just something in the air, acrid, like melting plastic, sharp and caustic and catching painfully at the back of Sirius's throat. Somewhere between acid and ozone, dense and poisonous and more overwhelming with every step. 

He coughs, covering his mouth and nose with a hand. His first thought - absurdly - is to wonder if the man in the house is alright. Perhaps there's been an accident; a gas explosion or something, a spill from a septic tank flooding chemicals and fumes out into the woods. Every shred of logic in him is telling him to turn back, to retreat, to breathe, and yet there's something else - something deeper, more primal, somehow - pushing him forwards, into the swirling, poisonous mist, eyes streaming and coat pulled up around his mouth, doing precious little to filter the noxious air as he stumbles along the trail. The fog is thick and soupy now, the way ahead obscured by some impenetrable haze of black and algae-green until suddenly, mercifully, he's spilling out into the clearing around the ramshackle house again. The air clears, and he coughs, and the man from the cabin is standing at the threshold and looking out at Sirius as if he can't believe what he's seeing.

"You're here," the man says, incredulous.

"Are you alright?" Sirius gasps. He tastes burning on his tongue, and tries not to think about how his new coat is probably going to smell for weeks.

The man lingers in the doorway, frowning across the garden at Sirius. His arms are folded across his chest, shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows again. There's dirt under his fingernails.

"What?"

"The smoke..." Sirius says weakly, dragging his eyes away from how the man's full lips are now pouted in distaste, and gesturing at the trees behind him. "Has there been an accident?"

"No," the man says wearily, and then, pushing himself off the doorframe and wandering back inside: "You'd better come in."

And blindly, Sirius does. He ambles, without ever really choosing to, up the garden path, past the roses and the ferns and the little white-capped mushrooms sprouting from the ancient roof tiles, and ducks his head under the low doorframe into the hallway. The man is bustling about in the kitchen again, just like last week, and Sirius follows the noise through the sitting room to find the man at the scrubbed wooden table, pouring something from a great pewter flagon into a clear glass.

"Here," he says flatly, passing the glass to Sirius, who eyes it sceptically as he struggles to catch his breath. 

"What it is?"

"Water," says the man, and Sirius fancies there's a hint of a smile pulling at his lips. "Drink it."

Sirius squints at him, taking a cautious sip from the glass, and then closes his eyes in relief as the crystal-clear water soothes his burning throat and seems to chase away the smoke and the sting entirely. He downs the lot, nodding gratefully, and hands the glass back with a tight smile.

"Thanks," he mutters.

"You're welcome," says the man, clearing his throat and padding off towards a deep porcelain sink under a low window. Sirius watches him go; the way his hands flit over the heavy taps as he rinses the glass out. The way his socked feet seem to pad noiselessly across the uneven wooden floor. The way he's standing there, suddenly, back in front of Sirius, eyebrows raised and arms folded once again across his chest.

"So you came back," he says flatly, and Sirius has to shake himself from his reverie.

"I did," he says, drawing himself up to his full height and attempting to smooth back his hair into something presentable. It's dry and chalky from the smoke; he tries not to grimace.

"And you brought your paperwork, presumably," the man presses on, and there's no question in his voice. He's just looking evenly across at Sirius, caught somewhere between boredom and a mild, unbothered sort of amusement.

"I did," Sirius says again, nodding and opening the button on his jacket to slide a hand into his inside pocket. "I did..."

It's empty. There isn't even an old pen, or a tissue in there today; it's completely empty. He stares at the man, wide-eyed, as he frantically scrabbles at the silk lining of his suit, and then pats every other pocket desperately, turning the ones on his coat inside out completely and finding nothing at all, save for his car keys and phone.

"No, I _did,_ " he insists wildly, still staring at the man in disbelief, pockets turned-out and useless. "I did. I brought it this week. I had it, in the car..."

The man watches him, and there's a faint pinch of something between his eyebrows that Sirius won't register until later; something that might be sympathy, or regret, but then he's shrugging and shaking his head, and Sirius feels as if he's gone completely mad.

"Must've forgotten it again," the man says, and then he's turning and crossing to the scrubbed table, gathering up the mess there; the pewter flagon, an old book with battered edges and a broken spine, and a hand-turned bowl that Sirius swears leaves tendrils of smoke in its wake as the man moves it over to the counter and dumps it unceremoniously in the porcelain sink.

"I didn't forget it," Sirius says numbly, eventually, and then pulls out his phone as if that might have an answer for him.

A part of him expects it entirely, but the bottom still falls out of his stomach when he sees that the phone - fully charged when he left the car - is now dead.

"Maybe it's just not meant to be," the man is saying, sounding kinder now, as if he might be speaking to an upset child. "Maybe your company should just forget about this place."

"No, it's..." Sirius mutters vaguely, still absently patting his various pockets as if the paper might suddenly reappear, as inexplicably as it vanished. "It's important... my father thinks it's very important that we acquire this land."

"Do you think it's important?"

Sirius looks up and across at the man, blinking dumbly. It's a clear, jarring question; cutting right to the root of all the things Sirius never lets himself think about. About what he's doing. About who he's doing it on behalf of. About how none of this brings him anything other than sleepless nights, worry, and a flat, grey sort of feeling at the end of every day when he realises, alone in his bed, that if he's made any real difference to the world that day it's probably not a good thing, and no one's ever going to thank him, for any of it. Not his father, or anyone in the company, or the smallholders and residents and everyday folk whose lives the firm turns upside down all in the name of a quick profit and expanded portfolios that benefit nobody, in the end, other than Orion and his inner circle. He'd never intended to end up here; doing cold, ugly things at his father's bidding, drafting contracts and agreements so viperous and grey that it's easy - always far too easy - to convince that homeowner they should sign over their land for pittance, or to tempt that growing business into dissolution to benefit some nameless conglomerate to whom Orion owes a favour or a debt. He'd sleepwalked right from school, to university, through graduation and blindly into a job that he hates with every part of him, and all for lack of a better idea at the time; the inspiration he'd been waiting for since he was a boy had never come, and Sirius resents himself a little more each day for it, feeling with every passing glance in the mirror himself - his old self - slip away to something formless and hollow, a shell that Orion can and has so easily begun filling with everything - every dark, insidious thing - that he himself takes pride in being. And there's just never been another path apparent to Sirius; he's longed for one, prayed for one to empty hotel rooms in the dark - anything to steer him, to usher him onward to where he's supposed to be. But it's never come. No paths, or escape hatches. No other options. Just emptiness, and numbness, and now this man blinking across the cluttered cottage kitchen at him, asking him the question he never dares ask himself.

"No," he says eventually, and with it feels some great weight peeling itself from his shoulders, somehow. "No, none of it's important to me."

The man smiles at that; a kind, gentle thing, pulling at his lips and dimpling his scarred cheek.

"Then perhaps," he says, voice soft and final. "We should say no more about it."

Sirius stays for a while after that, and he isn't sure why, but when the man pushes a cup of tea into his hands and offers him a seat on a squashy, blanketed settee in the low-ceilinged living room he doesn't question it, and he sits with him and sips at the herbal drink and doesn't, miraculously, think about the paperwork, or the walk back to the car, or what Orion's going to say on Monday when Sirius still doesn't have a signature. It feels unimportant now, as if saying it out loud has diminished it somehow; Sirius doesn't care at all if the firm doesn't secure the land, and his father already finds him unacceptable and disappointing in every imaginable way, and the rest is just noise. Just static, now; a droning hum in the background that, for the first time in years, is easy enough to push aside and live instead, brightly and clearly, in this little cottage in the woods with the man who makes him tea.

"How's the tea?" the man asks after a while, breaking the comfortable silence of the room. 

"It's good," Sirius says, and looks down at his cup in surprise because it is - suddenly - good. It's all hibiscus flower and mint, clear and strawberry-pink in the bottom of the chipped china teacup. "It's very good."

"Good," the man says with a smile, and then, after a sip from his own cup: "I'm Remus."

It's a funny, whimsical sort of name, Sirius thinks; something out of a storybook and the pages of history. It suits him. It also, he notes, with a horrible, sick twisting in his stomach, makes the thought of the firm one day triumphing all the more untenable. It was all very well - in a sense - when the plans involved one vague, unnamed dwelling, inhabited by some aged resident of the forest who perhaps would've fared better in some sort of communal living anyway. But now it's Remus, in the cottage with the white-capped mushrooms sprouting from the gaps between the mossy slates above their heads, and that doesn't feel right at all.

"Have you been here long?" Sirius asks quietly, even if half of him doesn't want to know the answer.

"Ever since I was born," Remus nods, making Sirius feel even worse. "Or thereabouts," he adds. "My grandma lived here. And she raised me from when I was very young."

"That's nice," Sirius says, taking another sip of the honey-sweet tea and trying not to imagine a great armada of bulldozers charging their way through the clearing. He swallows, and tries for a tight smile. "You've never wanted to live anywhere else?"

Remus laughs; a soft, breathy thing, all secrets and riddles, and Sirius finds himself drawn in entirely. "No," Remus says, shaking his head as he smiles across at Sirius. "I could never."

A bird lands on the windowsill at that, perched on the frame outside the mottled blown glass just over Remus's right shoulder. It's a blackbird, Sirius thinks, with beady round eyes and an egg-yolk yellow beak, and Sirius watches it, and Remus watches him, and sips his tea, and Sirius feels like something's passed him by. Some joke he's not a part of yet.

He leaves a while later, thanking Remus for the tea and not, this time, promising to come back the following week with the paperwork. Remus waves him off at the threshold of the cottage again, and Sirius treads the path back into the woods and finds himself - as he suspected he might - back at the car in a few short minutes. He doesn't question it today. He does, out of a sort of mild, unbothered curiosity, check the glove compartment and the back seat of the car to see if the paperwork ended up there somehow, but it's nowhere to be found and that, too, comes as no great surprise to him. 

It takes the whole drive back to the city for the taste of the strawberry-pink tea to leave his lips.

***

Orion is livid. There's an ugly, expected fight over lunch that Sunday, with Orion reeling at Sirius over his incompetence and hubris, and Walburga scolding him for his various inadequacies, and Regulus laughing quietly into his glass of wine and making Sirius want to punch him square in the face. There's talk of sending someone else to the woods, and on Monday Sirius hears word of another lackey from Legal heading out of the city with the paperwork and then, as he knew would be the case, there's an internal message sent round the team saying that there's been an accident out on the ring road; nothing serious, just an inconvenience, and the young trainee turns up back at the office the next day with a red face, a dented rear bumper, and a blundering, mumbled apology to Sirius for failing to get the signature. Sirius just shakes his head and goes back to his work, and sips at his tasteless coffee and wishes vaguely that it was the hibiscus tea from the cottage.

He goes back out himself the following weekend and tells himself, with Orion's voice still ringing in his ears, that this is the last time. The paperwork is stowed in duplicate today in his inner pocket and his locked briefcase respectively, his phone fully charged but switched off and tucked away in his jacket, as if that might make a difference. He'd convinced himself, the previous afternoon, that he'd get the job done today and that it would be fine, actually, because Remus would realise - in a last-minute change of heart - that the firm's deal was sound, and that he did want to move away, and he'd sign on the dotted line and Sirius would thank him and tuck the papers back into his pocket and that would be that. They would shake hands, and Remus's long, tanned fingers would curl around Sirius's palm, and he'd feel the grit on his fingertips brush against his skin and watch as the freckles on the back of Remus's hand flexed and shone with his grip. And he'd hung in that moment, inescapably, for most of the evening. It had been another date; another one of James's contemporaries from some bar or other, he isn't sure, and she'd been kind and funny with cherry-red lips and chestnut hair that she twirled prettily round her fingers over Negronis at some place in Soho, and Sirius had been bored to tears the entire time.

He parks up at the edge of the woods as usual, tightens the laces on his boots - brogues ruined entirely from his last two trips - and sets off down the trail, new waxed jacket buttoned up smartly and briefcase tucked under one arm. Birds sing overhead as he treads the now-familiar path, ignoring the forks and the meanders on either side of him, plunging headlong towards where he knows the cottage is and then, as the trail narrows and dark shadows from the pines draw in, the heavens open.

It's a flashing, violent thing; one minute the sky above is a plain sort of grey, flat and featureless, and then it's splitting, and the light seems to disappear entirely, and Sirius slips on the mud as the ground beneath him becomes saturated and marshy, the earth sucking at his every step as he wrenches his boots free. The rain is deafening, hammering on the branches above and the waxed canvas of Sirius's coat, sticking his hair to the back of his neck as he feels cold, rushing rivulets flood down past his collar, soaking his shirt. He pushes forward and blinks against the deluge, trying to see the path ahead, but it's like trying to see underwater; everything's blurred and shifting, raindrops clinging to his eyelashes, rivers now running in torrents around his boots until he slips, again, and he's in freefall.

He'll never know what happened to his briefcase. It slides from his grasp as he falls, spinning off down a bank into the undergrowth, and Sirius throws his hands down into the mire around him as he tumbles after it down the slope. His boots find no purchase, and the sky upends itself as he falls and falls and he'll wonder, later, why his life didn't flash before his eyes; he thinks that's what's supposed to happen, in moments like that, when the earth spins and everything starts to go dark and reality slips away. And then, he'll think glumly, perhaps it did; perhaps his entire life played out, on some canvas before him, and perhaps he just didn't notice. So few and far between are the times in his life that he deems worth recalling that he reasons it is, in fact, entirely possible that he witnessed the whole thing in that moment, in all its dull, grey nothingness, and simply didn't register it happening.

He does register the sharp, sickening crunch when he reaches the bottom of the gully and his ankle finds the immovable face of a small rocky outcrop, jutting up from the mud. He feels his bones shift, and the breath is punched from his lungs in a ragged gasp, and then he's letting out a deep, animal groan at the hot jolts of pain shocking their way up his leg.

" _Fuck_ ," he pants, blinking down at his foot. He tries to sit up, to reach and to try prise the sodden material of his trousers from his skin so that he can see the damage. His vision is black at the edges by the time he manages it, hands pale and trembling, and his stomach lurches when he pulls back the fabric to see something small and angular poking out against the skin near his ankle bone. It looks wrong, and unnatural, and Sirius breathes deeply through his nose as he grits his teeth and swallows against the nausea threatening to rise in his throat, and it's only then that he realises the rain has stopped. As quickly as it started, the deluge subsides and the sky clears, and the birdsong returns to the branches overhead as the sunlight streaming through the tree canopy warms his back and dries the mud crusted into the lines of his knuckles and underneath his fingernails.

And then he hears it.

It's his name being called, desperate and ringing, from the treeline up the bank he just tumbled down and when he looks up and squints against the bright daylight now rushing through the woods and down into the gully, he sees it's Remus. Remarkably, inexplicably, it's Remus, hurrying down the hill towards Sirius to stumble to a halt next to him, falling to his knees on the now-dry earth and peering down at his ankle in alarm.

"Oh god," Remus says breathlessly, hands hovering over Sirius's foot, amber eyes wide and panicked. "I'm sorry. Oh god, I'm sorry."

Sirius frowns at him, jaw still clenched against the rising tide of nausea in his stomach.

"What?" he pants, swallowing hard and wincing as a fresh shock of pain shoots up his lower leg.

"Oh god," Remus mutters again, and then seems to war with himself over something. He grimaces, a deep, troubled frown creasing his forehead, and then he's looking around the small clearing searchingly and then back at Sirius's ankle, and then at Sirius himself, biting down on his lower lip in consternation, as if he's on some great precipice and can't decide whether to jump or to turn back.

"It's broken," Sirius says harshly, hands fisted into dry leaves as he lays back and blinks dazedly up at the tree canopy. "It's definitely broken."

"Yes," Remus says, and then he's looking down at Sirius again, and a long moment passes between them. The blackbirds sing overhead, and the sun still streams down into the gully, and Sirius watches Remus through vision dotted with static, his ankle throbbing and his stomach turning every time he fancies he can feel the bones grind against each other.

And then Remus nods.

"Okay," he says, still breathless, and then he turns to Sirius's shattered ankle and - carefully, and so slowly - peels the fabric of his trousers away from the skin. "Okay."

"What are you doing?" Sirius murmurs. His tongue feels heavy and big in his mouth.

"Just..." Remus says, hovering his hands over Sirius's leg. Sirius thinks they might be trembling. "Okay."

He won't remember, later, if he actually felt Remus touch him. He won't recall the feel of his hands, or his fingers on the ugly, jutting bone and the taut skin that was already beginning to purple and bruise around it. All he'll remember is the heat of it; some warm, glowing ember that seems to start deep in his tendons and radiate, hot and rushing and golden through his flesh and his skin and the very bones of him, and then an electric spark as something inside himself knits back together, some small tapestry of veins and marrow finding its way back to where it used to be, back to something whole, and healed. There's a lightness to it all, as if Sirius might look down and see his skin aglow with some ethereal blaze, but when he finally feels the surge of energy that has him pushing himself up to his elbows, and finding his vision clear and bright again, it's to see his ankle covered back over with the fabric of his trouser leg, and Remus knelt with his head bowed, hands balled into fists in his own lap.

It's a long moment before either of them speak. Remus holds himself rigidly there, eyes still averted, and Sirius watches him, his mind entirely blank and raging with a thousand different questions, all at once.

"What," Sirius says finally, swallowing and tasting electricity and copper on his tongue, "was that?"

And then Remus does look at him, and there's something pulling at his eyes; something afraid, or regretful, and he's pushing himself up and taking a step away from Sirius, a distracted hand running through his hair and making it stand on end comically.

"I'm sorry," he mutters, and Sirius frowns.

"Why do you keep saying that?" he says, and then glances down at his ankle. He flexes it experimentally, tipping his foot side to side in his boot, and finds no pain at all. If anything, he thinks, it feels freer than it did before, the muscle loose and fluid like after a good stretch, or a glass of whisky.

Remus has wandered off now, a few paces down the clearing from Sirius, still running a hand distractedly through his hair as he stares off into the middle distance. Sirius watches him and then, carefully, pushes himself up to standing. He sets some weight on his ankle experimentally and finds it holds, and he takes a slow, tentative step, and then another, and then he's looking down the gully at Remus and shaking his head in wonder.

"I don't understand," he says stupidly. He looks down at his foot again, and the way he ankle looks normal and untwisted. "I don't get it."

Remus sighs, and looks over at him.

"I'm sorry."

And at that, Sirius feels the pieces of something start to come together. Some great puzzle; the joke he wasn't a part of. There's the winding paths of the forest, the cottage that loses itself in the woods and the old maps laid out on Remus's scrubbed table, strewn with dirt. How no one finds their way here, except Sirius. There's the acrid smoke and how it wound its way down his throat, and then that bowl of something that same day; that old mortar in Remus's kitchen, leaving tendrils of fog and ash in its wake. And then Remus, standing there across the clearing, hands twitching by his sides and apologising to him, and the way Sirius's ankle feels warm, and glowing.

"The rain," Sirius says dumbly. "Did you do that?"

It's a preposterous question. No man can control the weather; no one on this earth can summon storms, bring in great rolling banks of clouds and command the heavens to open, soaking the ground and conjuring rushing torrents of mud, rivers of rainwater washing away the scree and the detritus of the forest floor. No person in this world could do that.

But perhaps Remus can.

He's looking back at Sirius now, still lost and distracted, and then he's shrugging and nodding his head.

"Yes," he says quietly. Sirius holds his breath. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean for you to fall, I just-"

"It was all you, wasn't it?" Sirius says, cutting him off. "The paths, and the smoke? It was all you."

"Yes."

"How?" Sirius says flatly, frowning. He barks out a sharp, manic laugh that makes Remus flinch. " _How_ was it you?"

Remus shakes his head. "Sirius, it's just-"

"No," Sirius interrupts him again. "No, you have to explain this to me, Remus."

He thinks, in that moment, that he must be going mad. He hit his head in the fall, he reasons, and something shifted inside his brain, and now he's on the other side of his own sanity and he's talking to a man who can apparently command the elements, and the only possible explanation for any of it is that he's gone mad. And actually, he reasons, maybe that's fine; maybe that's better, in fact, than trudging back to the car, defeated for another week, and driving back to the grey city and sitting back in his grey office and waiting for the onslaught he knows will be coming from his horrible father when he finds out Sirius has once again failed. Maybe this is better than all of that, and he can't bring himself, yet, to worry too much about it. _Let me go mad and live in the woods_ , he thinks. _Let me just stay here and lose my mind in peace._

"Alright," Remus says quietly, after an age. He's moving then, treading through the sea of dry leaves to the very bottom of the gully, where a small beck babbles happily over rocks and pebbles in a narrow riverbed. He falls to his knees beside it, and looks back at Sirius over his shoulder before leaning forwards over the water and slipping both hands below the surface. Sirius takes a step towards him, frowning, and watches as the clear water meanders around Remus's wrists, crystalline and smooth as glass, and then Remus is bowing his head and saying something that Sirius can't hear. The water stills at that; freezes as if caught in some great gust of icy air, and Sirius flinches as he feels something land in his hair, fat and wet and cold. He looks up to find darkened clouds above the tree canopy, and then the sky is raining down on him again, running in rivulets over his upturned face. None of it makes sense; none of it makes any sense whatsoever, and Sirius is more certain with every raindrop that he's gone entirely mad, but he finds, wondrously, that he's never felt freer. He feels wild, primal and beautiful and Dionysian, as if he's suddenly been shown how to breathe for the first time in his life.

He laughs, madly, and opens his eyes in time to see Remus pulling his hands from the stream. The rain stops, and the skies clear, and Remus stands there quietly on the riverbank with his hands tucked into his pockets, teeth nibbling at his bottom lip as he waits for Sirius to speak.

"I still don't get it," Sirius says, but he finds he's smiling now, and shaking his head at Remus in wonder. "I don't get it at all."

"Me neither," Remus shrugs, nudging at a pebble with his boot. "It just is."

"And my ankle?"

Remus shrugs again, one side of his mouth quirking up into a smile to match's Sirius's. "The least I could do. I really didn't mean for you to fall."

"You just don't want anyone coming here."

"Basically."

Sirius nods at that, and knows - if he didn't before - that Orion will never get this land. Whether it's Sirius blocking the path himself or Remus building his fortresses of smoke and rainstorms and twisting, changing paths, Orion will never win, and the thought brings him such joy that he finds himself wishing he had the stack of paperwork in his hand if only to tear it up and ask Remus to set it on fire.

He laughs again then, and nods in realisation.

"The paperwork," he says, and Remus grimaces comically. "That was you, too."

"Yeah," Remus shrugs, smiling in apology. "Sorry."

"I thought I was going mad," says Sirius. "I still think I'm going mad."

"You're not. I promise."

They lapse into a silence then, Remus still toeing at the pebble by his shoe and Sirius gazing across at him, caught at the apex of wonder and bemusement and the sheer, fantastic delirium coursing through him at the thought of being here, in a forest, with a man capable of such wild and beautiful alchemy. He seems on edge now, though, as if waiting for Sirius's judgement; waiting for him to run for his life, perhaps, into the trees and out the other side and straight to tell the church or the police or the village locals with pitchforks. But there's no part of Sirius that feels afraid. He feels safe, and right, here in this hollow in the woods; he understands none of it and yet everything, _everything_ about this makes such wonderful, blinding sense to him that he feels he might die if doesn't stay here, if he doesn't see more, learn more, know more, and he isn't sure if it's the woods that are taking him in, or Remus himself, or perhaps that quiet, innate instinct that pulled him through the forest the cottage in the first place. Perhaps it's all three.

It's Sirius who speaks first.

"You haven't got any more of that tea, have you?"

Remus's answering smile is magic.


	2. Chapter 2

They walk slowly back to the cottage, up the slope of the gully and back onto the path, everything dry and sunny now, birds singing in the branches overhead and leaves shining emerald-bright in the crystal clear daylight streaming through the canopy. Sirius's clothes, too, are dry, and he's lost track of whether that was Remus or whether it's the doing of the suddenly beautiful Spring day around them in the woods, but he finds himself shucking off his mud-coated jacket and slinging it over one shoulder as he delights in the way his ankle feels new, and strong.

And then he notices Remus beside him, and how he's limping slightly, and he holds an arm out to steady him.

"Did you hurt yourself?" he asks. 

Remus smiles.

"I'm fine," he says, shaking his head and politely waving away Sirius's offer of help.

They round the corner to the cottage soon enough, and Remus sets his old kettle on the stove for tea whilst Sirius glances over the papers strewn over the kitchen table. More maps, he notes, and then he's thinking about the intern who didn't make it out of London last week.

"How come I can get here and the others can't?" he asks, looking over at Remus. He doesn't think he needs to explain the question now; Remus must know. He must know there were others, because he must've been the one that stopped them. It's hilarious, in a way, seeing twin pictures of Orion losing his mind in a corner office in the city at another lowly employee returning defeated and Remus, sitting in his sunny kitchen with a cup of tea, deftly altering maps and uttering clever words to make himself entirely unfindable.

"I don't know," Remus says plainly. He's leaning against the counter as he waits for the kettle to sing, arms folded across his chest, peering over at Sirius as if he himself is now the puzzle that must be pieced together. "I can't work that one out."

"Oh."

"People do come here," he shrugs, turning to pour the tea. "Walkers, and picnickers, backpackers. I let them come, but," he glances over his shoulder at Sirius again, frowning, "no one's ever come _here_. To the house."

"Oh," Sirius says again, and then he's thinking of that deep, innate pull he felt on the first day. How the map had tricked him time and time again, how his phone had failed him, and how ignoring both of them had allowed him to find the right path to the clearing outside Remus's overgrown garden. And there's something else, nudging at the edge of his consciousness, that demands further study; another day, perhaps.

They move to the sitting room with their tea, and Sirius closes his eyes as the honey-sweet drink washes over him. It's blueberries today, he thinks, fresh and fragrant, tea a wonderful, clear lilac in the bottom of his cup. They drink in a companionable silence, the only sound the birds outside and a distant, tinkling sound that Sirius now knows must be the brook down in the gully, and then Remus gets up to open the window and let the warm air in.

"Are you sure you didn't hurt yourself?" Sirius asks, watching him limp back to his chair. 

"It's nothing," Remus smiles, easing himself down into his seat. "It's just the..."

He trails off, still smiling, and shrugs.

"Tell me."

"No, it's the, erm," Remus says, stumbling on his words. He shakes his head, peering down into his tea and then looking back over at Sirius, studying him for a moment. "Everything has a price," he says carefully, tapping one finger rhythmically on the side of his cup. "Everything I do - other than little party tricks - has to be... paid for, if you like. Nothing comes from nothing."

Sirius nods, although he's not quite sure he's following. He is, he finds, leaning forward slightly in his chair towards Remus, so enraptured is he by what the other man is saying.

"So, for smoke," Remus goes on, and pauses, as if he's still thinking on how best to explain this, and it occurs to Sirius then that if nobody comes here - if Sirius is the _only_ person who has ever come to the cottage - then perhaps Remus has never had to explain it at all, ever. Maybe he's the first one to ever hear this. The thought makes him feel giddy. "For smoke," Remus says then, nodding to himself, "I need smoke. For water, water."

"The stream."

"That's right. Earth for earth," Remus says, and Sirius thinks of the maps and pathways and scattered dirt on the kitchen table.

"And bone for bone," he says, voice barely a whisper, and Remus nods.

"Essentially."

"Oh god," Sirius mutters, horror-struck as he glances down at Remus's ankle but finds it, mercifully, now tucked comfortably over the other, socked feet resting easily on the rug between them.

"It's only ever temporary," Remus assures him with a smile, waving away Sirius's concern. "Usually I'd use an animal bone."

"An animal bone?"

"I broke my wrist once," Remus says as he sips his tea. "I found a dead crow and used that. Worked well enough."

Sirius wrinkles his nose in distaste, which makes Remus laugh, a bright and lovely thing against the birdsong outside the open window.

"Yes, it was a bit messy."

"What else can you do?"

He feels like a child again. He's still so full of wonder, so enchanted now by whatever Remus is that he forgets, entirely, about why he's even here, and what he needs to go back to. If the outside world felt like background noise when Sirius was last here, today it's disappeared altogether; something abandoned, left to those who are trapped there, unknown and irrelevant to Sirius until he needs to return. He'll sit here, happily he thinks, all day and all night if only he can hear more stories from Remus, more secrets and tales of broken bones and shifting paths and the way he can carve open the very heavens above them with just a few muttered words and the clear water of the brook in the gully outside.

"Oh," Remus smiles, shaking his head. "It's not usually that exciting. It's mostly just... helping the plants in the garden grow," he shrugs. "Keeping the frosts away when I can. You've given me more to do over the past few weeks."

"I'm sorry."

"No, don't apologise," Remus says. "It's been nice, actually. I've quite enjoyed it," he adds with a wicked smile into his teacup, and Sirius can't help but grin back.

"Have you always been able to..." he asks, gesturing vaguely at Remus's hands. "You know?"

Remus nods. "I think so. My grandma could, too," he says, setting his cup down on the stone of the hearth by his feet. "That's why I lived here, with her."

"Your parents couldn't...?"

"We think it sort of," Remus waves his hand airily, shrugging. "Skipped a generation? My dad brought me here as a baby, I'm told. I never really knew them."

Sirius is quiet for a moment, pondering over his next words. He still wants more; wants to know specifics, and details, and the science behind it all. He's just so unsure of the etiquette around enquiring after someone’s apparently supernatural credentials. He wonders vaguely if Debrett’s offer a course on it. 

"So," he starts, clearing his throat. "What exactly... are you?"

"A Capricorn," Remus says smartly without missing a beat, and Sirius rolls his eyes.

"You know what I mean."

"I don't know," Remus shrugs, and there's that small, almost childlike smile tugging at his full lips again, creasing the freckles on his cheeks and pulling at the scar there. “Is the answer. I don’t think it’s something I am, really. I think it’s more something that I have. But I only seem to have it here.”

"How does that work?"

“I mean, I’ve left before," Remus says, and Sirius finds the image of Remus living anywhere but the woods horribly, presently jarring. "I've tried to live in other places. But it just didn’t work. Whatever it is. I didn’t have it in the other places. And without it, I felt...” he shakes his head, staring at a spot in the middle distance over Sirius’s right shoulder. “Tired. In my bones. Like the earth was trying to push me out and I was fighting against it. Or like this place was trying to claw me back.”

Sirius looks at the jagged scar across Remus's cheek, and wonders if that has anything to do with it.

“Crikey.”

“Quite," Remus nods. 

“So you’re stuck here?”

"There are worse places to be stuck," Remus retorts gently, and Sirius can't disagree with him on that.

"Bit of a waste, though," he says with a small smile, setting his own cup down on a side table covered in books and a stack of knitting, green and sandy-brown yarn tangled in a ball.

Remus cocks his head at him. 

"Just, you know," Sirius shrugs. "I think a lot of people in the city would murder to have you on side. You could... influence everything, couldn't you? Take over the bloody stock market, I bet. You could be the richest man in the world."

"Why on earth would I want to do that?" Remus asks after a beat, frowning across at Sirius.

"I don't know," Sirius shrugs. "You'd just have lots of money, wouldn't you? You could have a house on every continent. Drive fast cars. Invite Leonardo DiCaprio onto _your_ yacht.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. I just mean," Sirius says, shaking his head and finding no conviction whatsoever in his own words. He feels like he's reading from a script he's never understood; a rubric that's been explained to him time and time again and he's only now seeing how little sense it's always made. "You could be really happy?"

“Is that what would make you happy?”

It feels as pivotal a question as when Remus asked him, last week, whether the firm's business was of any importance to him. He knows these answers; deep in his bones he knows them, and feels them every waking minute of his life, but it's only here, in this cottage in the woods, that he can say any of it out loud.

"No," he says, and smiles at how incredibly obvious that is now. "No, it wouldn't," he shrugs, and then, like a torrent, feels everything else come spilling from him all at once. "But neither does working for my father. Neither does the city, or my apartment, or any of the women James makes me go to dinner with. And he," he swallows, looking down at his hands where they're twisting together in his lap. He has no idea why he's saying any of this, why he's telling his woes to this practical stranger in front of him and yet he finds - alarmingly - that he's entirely incapable of stopping. "I love him," he goes on, thinking of James, "but he has his own happiness. He knows what makes him happy; it's Lily and the baby and everything they've got going on. And I think the business _does_ make my brother happy, I really think it does. But it's not right for me, and it's not what I should be doing."

"What should you be doing?" Remus asks plainly.

"I don't know," Sirius breathes, suddenly exhausted as he looks back across at Remus. "I really don't know."

It's both a relief and a deep, cutting wound to say it. He wonders if there's something in the tea, or in the air here that's finally brought it to the surface and had him admitting to himself and to Remus the truth of just how at sea he really is. There are no clear ways; there never have been. None of the paths around him have ever had markers, and his map is as useless as the ones tucked in the glove box of his car on the other side of the woods that he knows would never and will never lead him to the cottage.

"I don't suppose you have a trick up your sleeve for that, do you?" he adds with a wry smile, and Remus shakes his head.

"I think that's something you're supposed to work out for yourself," he says kindly.

Sirius leaves, eventually, just as the high sun begins to slip below the treeline. He says nothing to Remus about returning, or about the paperwork, or the firm, but the way they part with a quiet goodbye and a cheery wave from Remus is enough for Sirius to rest easy that night, still struck out in some sort of daze at having witnessed what Remus did down in the gully and, at the same time, thrilled by the prospect of being back in the cottage just as soon as he can get away from the city. Orion asks him about the signature, of course, and Sirius tells him he hasn't got it and then, entirely unscripted and yet being the easiest protest he's ever offered his father, surprises himself by informing Orion that the forest is, it turns out, a terrible investment for them, and the road they want to charge through it is a complete non-starter and they'll lose millions on it if they push ahead, and Orion huffs and scowls and tells Sirius he wants to see the numbers on that. 

It's Thursday by the time Sirius next looks up from his desk, surrounded by empty takeaway containers and old mugs of coffee and drool on his laptop keyboard from where he fell asleep at one point.

"What?" Orion spits at him when he knocks on the glass door of his corner office, Sirius's tie askew and hair greasy from not having been home in three days.

"I've got the numbers," he says tiredly, then sits and watches Orion leaf curtly through the dossier Sirius has prepared. He'd found, late on Tuesday night, an alternative site for the contract; a patch of nothing just off the M25 crying out for a business park or whatever it is the heinous developer wants to build. Wednesday had been all phone calls to land owners, meetings with various legal representatives and then a long, arduous night of drafting contracts and proposals for the client. It's all sound; a better investment, in fact, and far, far away from the woods and the cottage and Remus.

He leaves the paperwork with Orion. There are board meetings to be had, he's told, and conversations with stakeholders, and he knows he'll have to wait to find out if he's done enough to save everything. He takes himself home on the Friday to shower and to sleep and to dream about white-capped mushrooms in a bright, sunny clearing, and then it's the weekend again and he's setting off, without ever really deciding to, on the long journey back out to the woods and treading the now-familiar path back through the pines.

"What happened to you?" Remus says when he sees him, leaning on the doorframe at the threshold to the cottage, and Sirius offers a tight smile against the dark circles he knows sag under his eyes and the tired, drawn pinch of his skin. He follows Remus inside, and gladly takes the cup of tea that was - charmingly - waiting for him on the kitchen table. He sips at it: rhubarb and honey, today.

"I found another site."

"For the development?" Remus says, sinking into the chair opposite him.

"Mmm," Sirius nods as he takes another gulp of the tea. "Out near Slough. Horrible place."

"So does that mean they won't come here?"

He looks up at Remus at that. He's all hope and wide, wondrous eyes, teacup clutched in his freckled hands as he gazes beseechingly across the table at Sirius.

"I hope it'll mean that," Sirius nods. "We just have to wait and see if the deal goes through."

They're both silent for a moment then, sipping at their tea. The blackbird is out on the windowsill again through the sitting room; Sirius can hear it whistling melodically.

"Thank you," Remus says quietly. "For trying to change their minds."

Sirius doesn't know what to say to that. He feels buoyed, and happy, at the way Remus is looking at him now, but at the same time can't bear the thought of being painted as some sort of hero in all of this. He's the one who kept driving out here with the paperwork. He's the one who battled through the woods, every time, determined to get that signature; for the firm, for his father, and barely pausing to think about what it might mean to Remus, or to the forest itself. He's the one who's spent the past god-knows-how-many years blindly doing their bidding, charging his way headfirst through ugly situations with ugly consequences for all those in his path, and it feels - and it's a horrible sort of clarity, now - like this is the first time he's ever stopped to think about any of them. The homeowners, the people rammed over by his contracts and his insidious legalese. The thought makes his skin crawl.

"What's up?"

He looks back across at Remus and finds him gazing kindly over his cup at him, all freckles and a small, comforting smile.

"Nothing," says Sirius.

They finish their tea in silence, and then Remus is bustling about the kitchen and producing a tray of nutty, sugar-sweet biscuits from somewhere. Sirius wolfs down three in a row, sighing at the way the syrup melts over his tongue, and Remus watches him with a strange, considered look on his face.

He stays late into the afternoon again, drinking more tea and helping Remus organise a bowing bookshelf in the hallway, and then he's waving goodbye and heading back out to the car with Remus looking out from the cottage as usual. Orion gets back to him about the deal on the Monday, and Sirius spends another long, sleepless week gathering together yet more paperwork; more deeds of title, more architect's plans and rationales for the proposed infrastructure on the new site. James drags him out on Friday night for drinks and another attempt to set him up with some acquaintance or other - who turns out to be brash and overbearing and James does actually apologise this time, and says he didn't realise how annoying she was before - and Sirius waves him off and goes home alone and dreams, as he so often does now, of babbling streams and Remus's magic hands and a warm, glowing haze that has him waking in the morning feeling whole and calm and at peace.

It goes on like that, more or less, and the pages of the calendar turn week by week, and Sirius finds himself back at the cottage whenever he can get away and whenever he has, however small it may be, a scrap of news to deliver to Remus about the new deal. It looks watertight, by now: even Orion has stopped asking questions, and everyone on the team knows it's just a matter of time before the papers get signed and Sirius doesn't consider that once they are, and once the ink has dried, there'll really be no reason for him to keep coming out here. If the whole point of the exercise was to protect the woods, and the cottage, and Remus, then surely once the deal is done Sirius should be walking away, and moving on to the next thing, and leaving Remus to enjoy their hard-fought peace. But for now, he simply doesn't think on it; he drives out to the woods, and wanders through to the cottage, and spends happy afternoons there sipping from teacups and watching Remus tend to his vegetable patch, and walking with him down to the brook at the bottom of the hill to gather plants that Remus says only grow along the water's edge. They crush them up in an old pestle when they get home, and Remus buries the mulch out in the flowerbed amongst bulbs and seedlings, and when Sirius comes back a week later it's to find great sprouting roots, carrots and potatoes and fruit trees that seem to have erupted overnight from the earth.

Whether out of respect for whatever forces Remus is wielding or an unwillingness to tip the balance they appear to have so easily struck together, Sirius doesn't ask to see any more; there's the occasional glimpse of a spark over the stove, when Remus waves a lazy hand towards the kettle and makes it sing on command - which Sirius suspects only happens when Remus can't be bothered to wait for it to boil - and, once, when Remus gets a nick on the skin of his forearm from a splinter of wood on the fence they're mending together, Sirius watches him take a brown apothecary bottle from a shelf in the kitchen and smooth a moss-green, sticky paste over the cut. He wipes it away a moment later and the skin underneath is golden and new, and he winks at Sirius over the flowerbeds and neither of them say any more about it. 

He aches for it though. Since the day in the gully, when he'd fallen and Remus had come to him and laid that glowing, wondrous heat deep in the bones of him he's ached for more. He's long since, by now, come to understand that either he's entirely mad - which Remus promises him he isn't - or he's found, by some miracle, some rare and precious plane on which a quiet, hidden magic actually does exist, and to see it once is to be immutably bound by it, and as the weeks pass Sirius feels a deep, irrepressible pull in his bones, guiding him back through the woods to Remus and wanting, in the most primal, essential way, to know him, entirely.

***

It's a balmy afternoon in June that finds Sirius tucked away in the cottage kitchen, sipping from a heavy, earthenware mug filled with the most wonderful vegetable soup he's ever tasted. Remus ladles out his own bowlful from the iron pot on the stove, and they eat together at the kitchen table as the light outside begins to fade to a warm, glowing gold, the panes of blown glass over the sink sparkling in the low rays.

"It's midsummer today," Remus says quietly a while later, finishing his soup.

Sirius frowns. "What's that?" he asks, still tucking into his own second portion. It's velvet-smooth, savoury and hot; he thinks he tastes truffles somewhere, and wonders what tricks Remus knows to seek them out in the woods.

"Summer solstice."

"Oh, right," says Sirius, and nods. "Do you celebrate that?"

He looks up to find Remus watching him across the table, a contemplative smile pulling at his lips.

"Not celebrate, exactly," he says enigmatically. The light streaming through the kitchen window circles in an aura around him, his sandy hair catching in the rays. Sirius can't look away.

"But it's important?" he murmurs, mug of soup stalled halfway between the table and his mouth.

Remus nods. "It is," he says, and then he's smiling in earnest, and standing from his seat. "Come on," he ushers, beckoning Sirius to follow him out into the hall. "I'm going to show you something."

They leave the cottage, Sirius tugging on his boots eagerly and stumbling out after Remus, and wander across the clearing and out past the treeline to the north of the house. The air is warm and fragrant with wild garlic, birds still flitting this way and that overhead as an evening chorus of insects hums around them. The path Remus leads them down is dry and sandy, loose pebbles and scree sending up clouds of dust around Sirius's boots as he pads after him, deeper into the forest and feeling, with each step, a wonderful, lifting surge of energy; a thrill at where Remus might be taking him. Perhaps this is the day, he thinks, as they clamber down a small bank and pick up a smaller, fainter path in the undergrowth, that Remus shows him more, and bathes him again in that incomparable, golden glow of his. The thought makes Sirius's skin tingle pleasingly.

"Where are we going?" he can't help but ask, when they must be a mile or so from the cottage. He's never gone so deep into the woods with Remus before; they usually stop at the brook, or at the copse of apple trees to the east, but this feels like they're going right to the very heart of the forest itself. The light feels different here; still golden and warm, but older, and hazy, somehow, as if the rays are being bent and refracted around them by some hidden energy or force. The insects, too, are quieter, their busy hum fading away into the trees and leaving not silence, but something that Sirius can't quite parse; a sort of low, heavy thrum of something, deep beneath his feet that he can't hear so much as _feel_ as they continue on through the woods.

"You'll see," Remus throws over his shoulder, and Sirius grins at him, and then finally, as they round a rocky outcrop covered in moss and pass by an ancient oak with creaking, gnarled branches, the trees begin to thin, and they step out into a wide, open clearing.

" _Oh,_ " Sirius breathes in wonder, and feels time stand still around him.

It's stone. A great many stones; tall and broad and covered in moss, lichen burrowed into every crevice and nook. Stones lining a wide, round perimeter of the clearing, some standing upright, with more stone atop them forming lintels and archways, ferns and brackens sprouting up from the earth around them. There's an inner circle, too, that Sirius can see from where they stand and then, in the centre of it all, a low, stone dais, roughly hewn from some ancient boulder, its top flat and jagged and green with age.

"What is this place?" he whispers, as if his very voice might break something sacred and hallowed, or else carry them both away through time, never to find their way back.

"I'm not sure," Remus says quietly beside him. "A temple, I think. I found it when I was young. I'm not sure my grandma even knew it was here."

Sirius nods, and looks around the clearing again. The light is so low now it frames the broad stone arches in soft, gilded halos, igniting the air around them and falling, Sirius sees, in a perfect beam on the central stone dais, as if had been built for that very purpose. Which, he realises, it probably was.

"How did you find it?"

"I just felt drawn here," Remus says reverently, and Sirius looks across at him to see his eyes closed and a gentle, easy furrow between his brows. He's leaning forwards, ever so slightly, towards the stones, the evening sun bringing out his freckles in copper and gold. "I come here sometimes," he goes on, eyes still closed, and Sirius still entirely incapable of looking away. "And always at midsummer."

"Why?" Sirius breathes, watching the way dust motes and pollen dance in the light around Remus, as if they, too, are drawn to some unperceivable energy here in the clearing.

Remus opens his eyes then, and looks out across the temple. "I think whatever I am - or whatever I have - comes from this place," he says. "It's stronger here. I can feel it. And it's never stronger than it is at midsummer."

There's silence for a moment; Sirius can still sense that deep, thrumming hum somewhere and wonders now if it's not coming from the very stones themselves. 

"Who built it?" he asks, and Remus shrugs beside him.

"Druids, maybe," he murmurs. "Could be even older than that. But I think whoever built it, built it here for a reason."

He looks across at Sirius then, and there's such fire - such wild, burning fervour in his eyes - that Sirius finds himself breathless, and heady.

"Do you feel that?" Remus asks in a low voice, and Sirius knows at once that he's talking that low, humming energy; that great shift Sirius felt as they left the woods behind and approached the temple.

He nods, and they hang like that, in that moment, for what could be an eternity. Perhaps time really does stand still here, Sirius thinks distantly; perhaps they've been here for months already, years even. Perhaps centuries have passed and everything beyond the bounds of the forest has collapsed and faded away to nothing, roads and the city and the very notion of everything Sirius has ever known, gone; crumbled away to dust. It's a terrifying and inspiriting fiction.

And then a twig snaps overhead - a bird or squirrel scampering high in the treeline behind them - and the moment breaks, and time comes rushing back to them.

Remus grins.

"Anyway," he says lightly, stepping further into the clearing. "The reason I come here at midsummer is because I can do things here that I can never otherwise do."

"Like what?" Sirius asks, schooling his voice back to steadiness with great effort. He feels breathless still, his mind clinging to whatever eternity Remus just held him in, and it's a heavy, onerous thing to move his feet beneath him and follow Remus out towards the temple.

"I'm going to show you."

Remus smiles as he steps into the middle of the circle, over the ferns sprouting from the feet of the henges around the stone dais. He beckons Sirius to follow, and then they're both sinking to the ground, Sirius on his knees - as feels fitting for a temple, he thinks - and Remus cross-legged in the grass, fingers twitching and flexing in his lap. 

Sirius watches him; watches his eyes fall closed, and the last flecks of copper picked out by the sun in his freckles fade and darken as the light finally slips below the treeline and the clearing quietens, the riot of gold giving way to something silver and consecrated. He watches him shift, settling himself firmly in his seat, and a faint smile flits across Remus's face as Sirius watches him place his hands on the ground before him; fingers spread, palms flat against the grass. He waits, and Sirius holds his breath, and then - as the sun slips away entirely and the shadows from the trees around them draw in - Remus curls his fingers slowly, pushing the tips of them against the ground. They sink through the weeds and the mosses, through to the loamy soil beneath until he's pushing them into the earth itself, eyes still closed, face flat and serene and distant to Sirius, somehow, as if Remus is elsewhere for a moment.

And then Sirius feels it. That energy, that hum from before is building and surging, the ground beneath them thrumming with some invisible force. It climbs, and climbs, and then some great dam is breached and the energy seems to spring up from the very earth, and as it does, it becomes light itself; every stone, every fern and bracken and mossy root around them begins to glow and ebb with the purest, most devastating light Sirius has ever seen. It's something electric; luminous and gleaming, plants painted in the wildest, most incandescent roses and teals, the stone dais itself dancing in waves of blue and brilliant white. Sirius looks to the trees, and sees the veins of their trunks rushing with a glowing, bright aquamarine, climbing and weaving along branches to light their leaves in lilac and sea-green. The grass, too, shimmers with tiny, incandescent flecks of indigo, the aura of it lighting Remus's smiling face from below and in that moment Sirius swears he's never seen a more beautiful thing. It takes his breath away.

"Nice, isn't it?" Remus murmurs, eyes still closed, fingers still pushed into the earth in front of him. 

Sirius has no answer for that. He breathes out, a great rush of air that scatters the glowing motes of pollen before him, and he watches them dance and twist up into the night air, up out of the clearing towards the stars. A bat flits overhead, apparently unperturbed by what's going on in the grass below him, and then Remus is opening his eyes and drawing his hands back into his lap, and grinning across at Sirius.

"Only happens at midsummer," he says, still lit beautifully by the shimmering blue glow around him. "No idea why."

Sirius blinks. "Will it stay like this?" he asks in wonder, gazing around at the stones and the trees, still glowing brightly in their neon colours.

"For a while," Remus says, shuffling down into the glass and stretching out on his back, arms reaching up to fold his hands beneath his head. 

Sirius shakes his head in wonder, staring up at the stone dais in front of them.

"It's..." he begins, and then gives up, and shakes his head again and lets himself sink down onto the soft ground beside Remus. He can feel the warmth of him along his side, all energy and life and magic.

"Yeah," Remus nods in agreement. "It definitely is."

They lay together in silence, Sirius revelling in the way the grass around him seems to glow all the more every time Remus shifts, as if something in him ignites something in the earth and the two can't help but spark off each other. He turns his head to look at Remus then, and finds him gazing upwards to the night sky with that quiet, serene smile still on his face.

"Do you want to see something else?" Remus whispers, and Sirius nods.

"Of course I do," he breathes. He wants to see everything. Everything that Remus can do here; everything that the temple can give back, and every colour that the earth can show them. He wants to see everything that Remus is.

He watches him breath in; a long, slow inhale, and then out again, and it's as if some fine, luminous mist drifts up from his full, plush lips. Some glittering essence, or smoke, winding its way through the air in tendrils and eddies, up and up, away from them in the clearing. And as it climbs, it grows; the mist becomes a haze, a glowing sea of pink and turquoise and white, translucent and phosphorescent and climbing still up above the treetops. Sirius watches it disappear out of view, up into the night and then - just when he thinks it's over - the entire sky erupts in a riot of brushstrokes, blues and lilacs and aqua-greens painting the darkness and colouring the very stars, great auras of luminescence lighting the night above them.

" _Oh_ ," breathes Sirius, and finds that he truly has no other words. It's indescribable. 

Remus chuckles beside him.

"I know," he says, quiet and soft. "I only found out I could do that here a couple of years ago."

They watch the sky together for an age, laid there in the grass, side-by-side. They watch the way the auras shimmer this way and that, changing and eddying and glowing gently from turquoise to periwinkle to a bright, icy white; their own personal northern lights, here above their clearing in the woods. They see stars break through the colours, bright and piercing, and laugh as bats and owls and nighthawks flit to and fro above them, hopping from branch to luminous branch.

And then, whether consciously or by that same, innate instinct that led him to the cottage in the first place, Sirius lets his hand find Remus's beside him, and he slowly twines their fingers together in the grass.

"Thank you," he murmurs into the night. "For bringing me here."

It's a long, silent beat after that, the only noise the owls hooting softly from their perches and the creaking of the pines around them as their glowing branches begin to quieten and fade, and then Sirius feels a perfect, steadying pressure on his palm as Remus squeezes his hand gently between them.

"Anytime."

***

They amble back to the cottage once the sky begins to darken again, and Sirius barely notices the path they take, back through the trees and past the old oak, up the bank and back onto the main trail until the house is there in front of them, candles that Sirius doesn't remember either of them lighting dancing and flickering cheerily in the windows. He feels more at sea than ever; changed, somehow, after what he saw at the temple and what he felt from the earth beneath him and the energy, the aching pull radiating from Remus. They huddle inside through the low door, and Remus sets to making them tea, and Sirius sinks back into his chair at the kitchen table and wonders how he's supposed to go back to everyday life after tonight. The thought is untenable.

Remus, for his part, seems buoyed and giddy after their time in the woods, and it's an easy enough distraction for Sirius to cast his thoughts aside for a moment and watch Remus bustle about the kitchen, boiling the kettle with an easy flick of his hand and dropping herbs and flowers into his old china teapot.

Sirius smiles as he watches him.

"Do you feel different?" he asks, leaning back in his chair as Remus sets the cups down between them. "After going there?"

"I do," Remus says, and looks almost embarrassed at being caught out in his animation and fervour. "It's seems to sustain me, somehow," he shrugs, pouring the tea into twin cups on the table. "It's why I go at midsummer, really. The rest is just for fun."

"What does it cost?"

Remus cocks his head at Sirius over his teacup.

"You said everything had a price," explains Sirius, sipping at his own drink. Hibiscus again.

"Oh," says Remus, and grins. "Not tonight. It's like a bonus, at midsummer."

"What else can you do there?"

"I turned into an owl once."

Sirius splutters into his tea.

"You _what_?" he chokes, wiping at his chin with the sleeve of his jumper.

Remus throws his head back and laughs, and Sirius swears the candles in the room glow a little brighter at that.

"I'm joking, Sirius," he says, passing a cloth napkin across the table and refilling Sirius's cup from the pot. "I've never turned into an owl."

Sirius tuts, dabbing at his face with the cloth and taking a bracing sip of tea.

"I mean, it wouldn't actually be the strangest thing I've seen in the past few months," he mutters, which only makes Remus laugh more. It's utterly charming, this new buoyant mood of his. He's always lovely, Sirius thinks, as he watches him across the table, but he's brighter tonight; shining and humming with the energy from the temple, full of life, and it pains Sirius to look at his watch and see how late it is, and how few hours remain before he has to be back in the office.

He clings to the time he has left though, and gladly accepts a third cup of tea when Remus offers it, and a plate of biscuits from a tin in the kitchen.

"So come on," he says, through a mouthful of cinnamon sugar. "What else can you do there?"

Remus smiles, and sets his teacup down on the table.

"Well," he starts, pursing his lips as he thinks on his next words. "Whatever energy is there is very old, I think. It runs very deep. The things I do here - the garden, and the things about the house, and the..." he gestures at Sirius's ankle under the table, smiling apologetically. "That's all easy, because that's now. That's all happening now, you see?"

"I think so."

"If I want to look back, or forwards, or if I want to..." he shakes his head, waving his hand airily, "know things before they happen. Anything to do with fate, I suppose, or time. I can't do that here. I need the temple for that. And it doesn't have to be midsummer," he adds, tucking into a biscuit himself. "That's just when I can do the fun stuff."

Sirius leans back in his chair, and studies Remus across the table.

"So you can see into the future?" he asks, frowning. "Theoretically."

"Uh huh," Remus says around his biscuit. "I can't see possibility, though. I can only ever see one path. It's like," he ponders, reaching for his drink. "I can only see it once fate has decided that it's going to happen. Does that make sense?"

"Sort of," Sirius says. None of it makes any sense, of course, but he thinks he knows what Remus means all the same. "Do you do that often?" he asks. "Look at what fate's decided should happen?"

"How do you think I knew you were coming?" Remus says with a grin over the rim of his teacup. 

"Oh," says Sirius stupidly, and the blank, irritated expression on Remus's face that first day that Sirius came to the cottage suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Remus walks him to the door when Sirius finally relents to the insistent ticking of his watch, and stands quietly at the threshold as Sirius toes his boots back on and pulls his jacket over his jumper, patting his pockets to make sure he's got his keys. His phone stays in the car these days; it's useless out here anyway, and he doesn't worry anymore about getting lost or misled on his way back out of the woods. He thinks he could walk that path in his sleep, now. 

"Got everything?" Remus says softly, leaning against the doorframe.

Sirius hums. He's lingering there, in the doorway, and Remus is smiling across at him, and the moonlight outside is casting pretty shadows across Remus's face. And there's a noise, somewhere; maybe the stream down in the gully, or some residual thrum from the temple deep in the woods.

"We should hear about the new deal this week," Sirius murmurs, looking down at Remus.

"Oh right," Remus says quietly. Sirius could count the freckles dusting the bridge of his nose, if only they could stand here for long enough.

"Hmm," Sirius nods. "I'll come back next weekend, and... let you know."

"Okay."

"Okay."

They hang together in silence then, and Sirius wonders for a moment if that timeless, eternal magic from the temple hasn't followed them here, keeping them in some liminal space between a before and after; a precipice that it physically hurts Sirius to pull himself back from. He clears his throat, and Remus smiles, and Sirius doesn't know what to do about that - about any of it - so he just steps away, nodding his goodbye to Remus in the doorway and ambling off through the clearing and into the treeline. He doesn't turn around, but he feels Remus watching him, and he smiles to himself as the ferns that line the path glow a soft, luminous aquamarine to light his way back out of the forest.


	3. Chapter 3

The deal goes through the following morning. Sirius sleeps late, and arrives at the office to find an irate Orion shouting about some line in the amended contract that apparently means he won't make quite as much money as the Legal team had promised. But the deal is done; the new site has been approved, the paperwork has been signed, and Sirius shuts himself in his office and smiles to the empty room in the knowledge that the woods, and the cottage, and Remus will be left undisturbed now. He wiles away the rest of the morning flicking through his emails, nothing much holding his attention, and then James rings him and tells him he's taking him out for lunch.

"Congratulations," James cries over steak and champagne an hour later, clinking their glasses together across the table. "Reg said that deal you put together was unbelievable."

"I don't know about that," Sirius mutters into his glass. "It's going to make Orion more money than the old site would've done, and that's all he's bothered about, isn't it?"

"No, no," James shakes his head, waving his steak knife at Sirius in reprimand. "Reg said the work you did on it was really something. You should be proud."

Sirius frowns and stuffs a forkful of salad into his mouth. "Why have you been talking to Regulus so much?" he says, narrowing his eyes.

"No reason," James shrugs. "He just rang me the other week and told me you'd been acting weird. Think he thought something was up."

"I have not been acting weird," Sirius says sharply. "Regulus needs to mind his own business."

"Think he was just concerned, mate."

"I'm literally fine," Sirius says, and James raises his eyebrows at him in a way that tells him he isn't buying a word of it, and Sirius scowls and downs another swig of champagne.

In truth, he probably has been a little rattier than usual towards his brother of late. It's something in the way the office seems to sap the energy from him now even more rapidly than it used to. How he hasn't been able to focus on anything other than the new deal for weeks, because getting the new contract signed was the only thing that was going to save Remus, and it seemed at the time like nothing else mattered. It still seems that way, and Sirius feels a hollow, gnawing worry in the pit of his stomach as he thinks on what on earth he's going to cling to now that the deal is done. The thought of going back to other projects, other contracts to fight over and bulldoze through makes Sirius feel panicked and cold, and he just can't see the point in any of it, anymore. How, he thinks, a few days later as he's brushing his teeth and staring blankly at himself in the mirror of his bathroom, can he go back to that now, after everything he's seen? After the forest, and the temple. After the northern lights.

After Remus.

He goes back to the cottage at the weekend, as promised, and delivers to Remus the good news and an assurance that it's done, now, and that nobody else will be coming to the woods and that he'll be left in peace. He presents him with the original paperwork then, and somehow isn't shocked that he's finally made it to the cottage with the stack of papers intact and still tucked safely in his jacket pocket, and Remus delights in tearing the envelope into small, square pieces that he holds up and lets scatter away on the wind, dancing up above the garden before turning to ash and cinders in the air until there's nothing left of them.

"Thank you," he says, with a grin on his face. "For helping me."

"You don't have to thank me," Sirius says quietly. He feels lost, today; hollow and cold, like every part of him knows that this is the last time he can reasonably come out here. Anything more would be an imposition, he thinks, and never mind the night at the temple and everything he felt there and everything he feels now, in the garden, with Remus looking up at him with that lovely smile on his face.

"Tea?" Remus asks brightly, and Sirius feels something inside himself cleave in two when he shakes his head.

"I should go," he says. "I've erm," he mumbles, looking down between them and tucking his hands deep into his jacket pockets. "I've taken up enough of your time."

"Have you?"

He looks back up at Remus, and finds him peering at him owlishly, and then he's thinking of Remus throwing his head back with laughter and telling Sirius he turned himself into an owl once, and the whole thing suddenly hurts far, far too much. He can't go in for tea, because if he goes in for tea it'll just all the more painful when he has to leave, and when he has to walk out of the forest for the last time and leave Remus with the peace he promised him.

"Thank you," Sirius murmurs now, and swallows past something hard and ugly in his throat. "For everything."

"You really don't have to go," Remus says, frowning. "Stay for tea."

"No, I can't," Sirius says, shaking his head and scuffing his boot against a pebble on the dusty garden path. "I have to go. I have to..." he huffs out a breath, looking at the cottage, and the trees, and anywhere that isn't Remus looking up at him with that confused little scowl and those wide, beseeching eyes of his. "I have to go figure some stuff out."

Remus is quiet for a moment at that, and then he takes a step back, and nods, and Sirius wishes he'd never come here at all.

"You need to figure out what makes you happy," Remus says softly, and there's a small, gentle smile on his face when Sirius finally looks across at him.

"Yeah, something like that."

"Well," Remus says, and it feels final now, and finished, and Sirius hates it. "I'm sure you'll find it. Somewhere."

"Thanks," mutters Sirius tightly, and then, finding he's utterly incapable of saying anything more, he gives Remus a nod and a smile that doesn't reach his eyes, and walks smartly back up the garden path towards the edge of the clearing. He manages a quick " _Bye_ " over his shoulder before he slips beyond the treeline; Remus either doesn't hear him or chooses not to answer, and Sirius clenches his jaw the whole walk back to the car, his hands balled into fists in the empty pockets of his coat.

***

The weeks drag by in a slow, agonising dirge after that; a funeral procession of pointless meetings that Sirius barely participates in, new projects his father assigns him to and endless questions from James and Regulus about where he's been, and what he's been doing, and why he's only ever half-present for every conversation and phone call and dinner these days. He spends long nights, alone in his apartment, scouring the internet for the inspiration he feels himself physically aching for by now; new jobs, new opportunities. Travel. Perhaps he should go back to school, he wonders; start again, choose something for _him,_ not something that will pacify his mother and set him up nicely for Orion to mould and carve into a carbon copy of himself. But then, he has no idea what he'd choose. There's nothing that calls out to him, no new path or quest; there are things he's interested in, and knows it would be mildly diverting to study them for a few years but nothing sets him alight. Nothing gives him that hum, that deep, steady thrum of energy that he craves. It's all surface-level at best.

He goes out for dinner with James in the autumn and listens to tales of Harry's first day at school, and Lily's ongoing plans for the wedding and it's lovely, and he's thrilled for James, but it's all in a sort of flat, distant way that he feels very separate from. A world that he isn't a part of anymore; not really. He'll do the babysitting, and be utterly charmed by Harry. He'll go to the wedding, when it comes, and he'll help James on with his suit and he'll kiss Lily on the cheek and tell them he loves them both, but then he'll leave, and go back to his empty apartment, and his empty job, and his empty life, and none of it will matter. It'll just be a dead, hollow thing.

"I can't do this anymore."

James looks up from his sea bass, fork halfway to his mouth. "Can't do what?" he says.

"Any of it," Sirius shrugs, shaking his head and looking blankly across at James. "I just can't do it."

"What are you talking about, mate?"

"I'm not happy here."

They never really talk like this. Sirius adores James, and always has, but they never do this; they never lay their cards on the table like this, much preferring to assume that the other is fine until they say otherwise and even then, it's usually just a quick text or phone call saying they could do with a night out because they're stressed, or bored, or whatever. It feels too real to say any of it out loud but Sirius feels beaten, now; worn down by the efforts he's having to commit to his attempt to slip back into whatever shadow of a life he was leading before. Before the woods. Before Remus. He feels spent, entirely, and the only thing that's left is to say it.

"I'm really not happy here, James."

James sets his fork down on his plate, watching Sirius steadily across the table.

"Okay," he says slowly. "So what would make you happy?"

"I have no idea," Sirius shrugs. He knows he must look wretched; tired and strung-out, desperate and wild. Lost entirely.

"What about..." James shakes his head, glancing around the tablecloth as if the answer might be there. "Travel? Get a girlfriend? Or, I dunno... look for a new job?"

"I've tried."

"And?"

"Nothing fits," Sirius says flatly, poking despondently at his potatoes. "I just have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing."

James watches him for a long moment, thinking. He feels like a child; it's pathetic, and self-indulgent, and how he longs to be someone like James. Someone who's always known their path. Someone who chose the right fork in the road, every time, by some instinct or some innate truth and found themselves delivered to a clearing that made complete and immediate sense to them. How he longs for such a thing.

"Let me lend you a book," James says smartly, breaking the silence between them and going back to his dinner. "Lily's obsessed with it. It's this self-help thing about the future, and fate, and it's meant to like, erm," he waves his fork in the air abstractly, chewing through his mouthful of steak, "get you thinking about what fate wants you to do. I know it sounds a bit esoteric, but it's actually quite interesting. It's written by this guy who-"

He goes on, still speaking through mouthfuls of food as he talks about some chapter or other, and what the author studied at some university, but Sirius isn't listening. He's hung on the words; fate. The future. What _fate_ wants you to do. And he's knows there's a shortcut to that. He knows, in his bones now, that if fate has chosen a path for him already then he has a way of seeing that, and it's a cowardly, passive thing, because he also knows that it's a destination he's supposed to arrive at alone; something he's supposed to work out for himself. Just like Remus said, that day in the cottage.

But he's tried. He feels spread thin from trying, old and weary and spent from the long nights reading and researching and trying desperately to find some sort of map, some marker or pathway laid out for him with a sign that calls out and says _this way! This is the right way to go!_ And it hasn't come. It's been months, years even, and it hasn't come. And he can't do it anymore.

He waits another month before going back. He gets the book from James, and tells him to thank Lily, and flicks listlessly through it in the solitary glow of his bedside lamp and gains precious little from its pages. It's the right idea, at least - fate, and possibility - but the wrong execution entirely, and he knows that if he's going to crack this it has to be clear, and absolute, with no subtext or space between the lines for misinterpretation or more floundering for lack of a final, unambiguous direction. He's battled with his own mind for so long now that he knows he needs to step aside, and let fate itself dictate entirely his next move, because then there can be no room for equivocation, or dissatisfaction, because it's not a choice, then. It's not a judgement on Sirius's part, or a decision he can come to regret. It just is.

The drive back out to the woods, after so many weeks away, stirs butterflies and electricity deep in Sirius's stomach. He wonders, as he trundles down the back roads and trails, if Remus will see him coming. If he's been to the clearing in the woods and sat by the stone dais and seen, as fate would dictate, Sirius coming back to him, lost and adrift, begging for some sort of answer. Anything to clear the mire that's dragging him down, day by day, and eclipsing any hope he has of reaching some bright and promising shore.

_Just tell me the way,_ he thinks, scrubbing roughly at his face as he parks up near the entrance to the woods, looking out down the tree-hemmed avenue ablaze now with copper and scarlet. _Just tell me where I'm supposed to go._

Remus is waiting for him, in the doorway of the cottage, when Sirius reaches the clearing. He looks the same as ever; linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his tanned arms, dirt below his fingernails, and a quirk of a smile dimpling the skin of his jagged white scar.

"Hello," he says quietly as Sirius approaches.

"You were expecting me," Sirius says flatly, and can't help the smile Remus draws from him in return. There's a crow perched on the guttering above the doorway; black and shiny and pecking at something between the roof tiles. The tiny white-capped mushrooms are still there, as are the ferns, and the wildflowers, and the ivies that wind their way in tapestry patterns up the ramshackle stone walls of the cottage, twisting and weaving over the lead-lined windows to the bright, busy sitting room. It feels like coming home.

"Tea?"

He follows Remus inside, and sinks into his chair at the table, and sips from the chipped china teacup of apple-green tea; he thinks it might be kiwi fruit today, and wonders, feeling some spark inside himself reignite, how on earth Remus manages to grow kiwis for tea out here in a tiny vegetable garden, in the forest, in autumn.

"How have you been?" Sirius asks, listening to the gentle song of the blackbird that's perched, as ever, on the window ledge outside.

"Well, thank you," Remus smiles, quiet and soft over the rim of his teacup. "But you haven't, have you?"

It shouldn't come as a surprise. If Remus has been at the temple, and if he's been looking ahead - for whatever reason - then of course he would've known the moment Sirius decided to come back here. Of course he was expecting him; that's not a shock to Sirius, and he doesn't question it. But how, he wonders, would Remus know _why_ he was back here - how would he know the dark, wallowing wretchedness of Sirius's time since he left the forest - if he hadn't looked for that, too? And then, Sirius wonders, if Remus hasn't been watching him, somehow. Panning tea leaves in the bottom of a cup or spreading crystal stones atop the temple's dais only to see, through the distance between them, Sirius's ungainly descent into the grey, lonely pit he now inhabits every day.

It's a thrilling, thrilling thought.

"I need your help," he says quietly, and Remus's face remains entirely unreadable. "Please," he adds; a whisper, as he gazes across the table imploringly. "I know you can help me. And I swear, I'll never ask anything else of you, ever again."

Remus watches him evenly, arms folded against his chest. He's silent, searching somehow, delving deep into the very spirit of Sirius and Sirius, for his part, feels entirely unable to stir or to speak or to continue his pleading soliloquy. He can only wait, and revel in the wondrous, terrible feeling of Remus taking him apart, piece by piece, chewing gently on his lower lip and tapping a slow, rhythmic pulse with a fingertip against the old linen of his shirt.

"Please," Sirius chokes out after an age, and Remus seems to come back to him then.

"I can't do it here."

Sirius feels himself sag as the moment is broken, and he leans back in his chair and nods, feeling breathless and full of electricity.

"But you can do it. Can't you?"

"I think so," Remus says quietly.

They finish their tea in silence, even the blackbird outside having quelled his song, as if he senses the gravity of the day now. Remus disappears then, and comes back with a jacket and a flask of water for the walk, and they stuff their feet into their boots in the hallway and head, wordlessly, out of the cottage and towards the northern edge of the clearing, past the treeline and through onto the sandy, dry trail scattered with scree. The forest is darker now, the summer's light having given way to a lower, thinner sort of air, and Sirius pulls his coat up around himself against the breeze. They clamber down the steep bank, and pick up the narrow, hidden trail through the undergrowth, and then round the ancient oak with its gnarled, cloven branches and the rocky promontory greened with moss.

And there it is. The temple, quiet and hallowed as before, stone greyer now in the autumn light and the ferns dying back to a furled, blazing umber as the lichens on the lintels whiten and fade. But still that energy; that low, ancient hum, deep beneath Sirius's feet. It's softer, now, than it was at midsummer, but unmistakable in its power and beauty. Sirius feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

"What will it cost?" he whispers, as they wait together at the edge of the clearing, the colourless September sunlight filtering weakly down to the central dais.

"I'm not sure," murmurs Remus, and Sirius looks across at him. "But whatever it is, I'm happy to give it. You'll just owe me," he adds, turning to Sirius with a small quirk of a smile that sets something racing inside Sirius, deep in the bones of him. "Come on."

They weave between the henges and the standing stones, past the second circle and to the centre of the temple, where the thrum of energy is clearest, and Remus sinks to the cool, dewy ground, settling himself in the grasses and the moss and coaxing Sirius down with him.

"Will it work?" Sirius breathes, as Remus takes his hands in his own and turns them to face the sky, pressing his thumbs into the soft, fleshy centre of Sirius's palms.

"I think so," Remus says softly, as the last of the dying autumn light fades around them. "It's an old, old magic. But I think," he says, nodding across at Sirius and holding him in his gaze, "I think you wouldn't be here if fate hadn't already decided your path."

Sirius swallows, and nods, and looks down at their joined hands and the way, suddenly, there's a faint, white aura radiating from somewhere that might be the ground, or the stones, or perhaps Remus himself. He watches him take a deep, anchoring breath, and then Remus is closing his eyes and the point at which his thumb presses against the skin of Sirius's palms grows electric and white-hot, a pinprick of light searing through his veins, circling his wrists and weaving its way, fiery and winding, up his forearms, through his biceps and down into the very heart of him. He feels stuck, rooted and charged, his whole body ringing with some blinding, ancient energy, brilliant and devastating.

And then Remus opens his eyes.

"Oh," Sirius breathes, in wonder and horror. Remus's irises are misted overly entirely, pupils obscured like mirrors eclipsed by the cold; twin silver lenses dulling the amber there to a faded, swirling mire of grey cloud and infinite, unending fog.

_Sight for sight._

Sirius watches him for a moment, unmoving in the face of the sheer and terrible beauty of Remus in that moment, and then he's closing his own eyes desperately and waiting. Waiting for the answer; for a pathway, and a marker laid out before him and then he'll know, _he'll know_ where he's supposed to go. Who he's supposed to be. What will make him truly, finally happy. But nothing comes. It's just darkness; darkness, and that searing, electric energy that tells him that something must be happening but he can't _see_ it, he can't find the answer through the gloom and the hollow shadows around him.

"It's not working," he mutters, a lost, ragged thing, and Remus tightens his grip on Sirius's hands between them. "I don't see anything."

"You will," he says softly. "It'll come."

Sirius waits, and waits, eyes closed and hands alight and heart pounding a rapid, aching tattoo against his chest. And there's still nothing; still darkness, and shadows, and despair. He wants to scream; he wants to hit his head against the stone dais and have it burst forth and show him, in vivid technicolour, the answer. He wants Remus to bellow it at the top of his lungs. He wants the owls and the bats and the nighthawks around them to shriek and to caw until the pathway materialises in front of them, clear and bright and finished.

He shakes his head in defeat, and sighs, and opens his eyes.

And then he gets it.

It's Remus. He sees Remus; there, right in front of him, sightless and still and aglow with that bright, champagne aura around him. His face is bathed in moonlight; silver and serene, so beautiful Sirius feels he might die, held here in an eternity by the stones and the earth and the blinding, white heat joining him to the man in front of him, sat cross-legged in the grass of this ancient temple in the woods. And he gets it. The innate, unyielding instinct that pulled him into the forest that first day and showed him the way, blindly, to the cottage with the vegetable garden and the tiny, white-capped mushrooms. The sheer faith he had when his feet carried him, stumbling, drowning, through the acrid fog and the toxic mists out into that bright clearing, and back into Remus's kitchen with its chipped china and tea that tastes like flowers and honey. And the pull, the aching, inescapable pull he's felt every day since; every week he's spent away from the woods, every meeting and dinner and conversation that couldn't hold him, couldn't fill him in a way the trees and the birds and the terrible, wondrous beauty at the very heart of the forest could, and that led him right back here, tonight, to sit amongst the ferns and the stones and be held, in this eternity, by Remus.

"What do you see?" Remus says softly, the mists still swirling and eddying over his irises, sightless.

Sirius doesn't speak. He can't. There's something, in the air or the stone, or the electricity between them that won't let him speak, won't let him sully this moment with words or questions, and all he can do, now, is watch Remus; the silver of his freckles. The way the moonlight darts over his jagged white scar. The full, tender plushness of his mouth as Sirius leans forward, over their joined hands, and presses a slow, chaste kiss to his lips.

It's like coming home, all over again. Whatever force or energy has woven its way from Remus's fingers up into the very heart of Sirius surges forward again now, binding them inextricably to one another and making every cell, every fibre and molecule in Sirius's bones sing in exultation at finally, _finally_ finding it. The answer. The pathway.

Remus.

He pulls back then, and the aura around their joined hands begins to quieten as the grey mists in Remus's eyes part and clear, the magic around them fading away and leaving behind only the low, earthly hum of before, and Remus frowning cryptically across at him in the darkness.

"Sirius?"

"It's you," Sirius murmurs. His hands are still resting in Remus's, palms turned towards the sky. He looks down at them; at how perfectly they fit together, like jigsaw pieces slotting into place, and marvels at how the solution to the puzzle was there in front of them, the whole time. "It's you."

Remus is quiet for a long moment. There's an owl in the treeline, hooting dolefully. Sirius holds his breath.

And then, like the sun rising after winter, daylight rushing through the forest on a summer morning, a bright, golden grin bursts across Remus's moonlit face, and the owl in the treeline is startled away by a great, pealing laugh.

"It's me?"

Sirius feels a laugh spill from his own lips then, stunned and hopeful, eyes wide as he stares across at Remus with his blinding, lovely smile, eyes crinkled in the corners and freckled cheeks dimpled.

"Of course it's you," he says dumbly, and now it feels like the most obvious thing in the world. Of course it's Remus. Of course it is. Of _course_ it is.

He wants to shout it from the treetops.

"It's me?" Remus asks again, still grinning.

"Is that alright?" Sirius murmurs.

"More than alright," Remus says softly, and then he's taking his hands from the palms of Sirius's and letting them rest, instead, wonderful and happy and warm on the sides of Sirius's neck, fingertips trailing at the edge of Sirius's hairline as he leans forward and waits for Sirius to press another kiss to his lips.

Which he does. Again, and again, there in the ferns and the grasses of the temple, surrounded by the standing stones and the trees lit with moonlight. It's a fire; a blaze between them, searing through the darkness and up into the night, sparking off the air and the earth and the stars above.

And Sirius knows, in that moment, and for the first time in his life, that he's exactly where he's supposed to be.


	4. Epilogue

"Bugger."

Sirius winces as he feels the thorn catch the back of his wrist, dragging at the skin there and nicking a shallow, jagged line that reddens and stings, bright-scarlet blood seeping out and glistening in the afternoon sun. He dabs at it with the hem of his t-shirt, shucking off his gardening gloves, and watches as the blood soaks through the fabric, grit and soil smudging over his skin when he wipes at the wound futilely.

"Don't do that," Remus tuts softly from the other side of the flowerbed. He sets his own tools down and reaches for Sirius's hand, holding it up to inspect the cut. He runs his own hand over the skin there, murmuring something that Sirius can't make out, and Sirius feels his flesh knit back together as the graze closes itself and appears, for a fleeting moment, as a faded red mark on Remus's own wrist.

"Don't do _that_ ," Sirius says fondly, taking his hand back and shaking his head at Remus across the roses. "I could've just used the honey again."

There's a jar, on the long shelf in the hallway, that Sirius has come to know all too well over the past year; wild garlic and honey from the hives near the copse of apple trees, mulched together into an ointment with peppermint oil and some herb he doesn't know the name of. It's a thick, sweet-smelling thing, a paste that Remus smooths over Sirius's skin with his thumb anytime Sirius gets a cut, or a scrape, which seems to happen on a weekly basis. His fingers are too used to keyboards and touchscreens, he reasons every time, and his muscles aren't yet used to working in the garden, or pulling up root vegetables, or repairing the broken ivories on the old piano in the corner of their bright and busy sitting room. He delights in it, every time; the feeling of Remus's gentle hands holding him and healing him, and the way the paste - with a few clever words from Remus - knits together his skin and leaves it golden and new, supple under Remus's touch.

"Clumsy," Remus murmurs, smiling to himself as he goes back to the soil, and Sirius grins at him.

"Midsummer today," he says. He pulls his gloves back on and gives the rose thorns a wide berth as he pushes more bulbs into the ground around them.

"It is."

"You'll be going to the temple tonight, then?" Sirius asks, gently batting another rose out of his way.

"Of course," Remus nods.

"Can I come?"

Remus looks up at him then, through the flowers, and grins.

"Of course you can," he says, wiping his brow with the back of his hand and leaving a charming smudge of dirt just above his right eyebrow. "Tonight might be the night I finally turn into an owl," he quips, and Sirius chuckles.

"Well, as long as you don't stay that way. I don't think owls are very good conversationalists."

They go to the temple, now, once a month at least, having discovered at some point in the past year that a full moon in the sky means Remus can command the ferns and the mosses, somehow, and the birds in the trees around the temple's clearing. He'll strike up his hands, as they lay together side-by-side, and conduct them all in a symphony of birdsong and trailing ivies weaving this way and that across the night sky. He'll bring the breeze whistling through the canopy, sounding like pipe music and lutes, and the first time he'd done it Sirius had found himself in tears at the beauty of it all, and Remus had kissed him and wound himself around him and promised that they'd come back, every month, just so Sirius could see it again.

They still don't know how any of it works. Not the lights, or the birdsong, or the way Remus looked into Sirius's mind for him and found that answer he'd been looking for his whole life. Sirius had thought, in the early days in the woods, that perhaps they should research together; perhaps there would be books on the subject, he'd said, old maps or stories plotting out this forest and the stone circles and perhaps there were others, even. Perhaps there were forests and temples all around the country, all around the world and maybe there were other people like Remus and maybe those others could teach them, and explain it all to them, and help them understand.

But when he'd packed up his apartment in the city, and left his office, and told Orion that he was done; when he'd driven out to the woods with the smallest backpack of clothes and books, and left his boots next to Remus's in the long timber-clad hallway of the cottage, and curled up in bed with him under a patchwork blanket and sheets of soft linen, he'd known that it wouldn't matter. None of it mattered; how it worked, or why it was, or what Remus could do with his hands and the elements and the very fibres of the forest around them. It didn't matter, because it was Remus's, and only his, and nobody else ever needed to know.

They had left the forest, on occasion; for Harry's birthday, and the wedding, and Lily had been utterly charmed by Remus, and even Regulus had seemed to take to him, and James had ushered Sirius away late into the after-party, several glasses of champagne down, and told him that he got it, now, and that he wanted Sirius to be very happy in his cottage in the woods with his companion who smelled like honey and wildflowers. He'd been shocked, at first; thrilled to hear that Sirius had met someone, baffled to hear that it was a man, and utterly lost when Sirius explained to him that he was going to go live in the forest, and tend bees, and grow vegetables for soup in the wintertime.

"I don't get it," James had said flatly over dinner, the night before Sirius left, and Sirius had shrugged and smiled and carried on eating his salad.

"Me neither," he'd said happily. "It just is."

He still visits his parents from time to time, but leaves Remus at the cottage when he does, and it's something between Remus not being able to be away from the forest for too long and Sirius not wanting Orion to seep his poison into this bright, glorious thing they've built between them. He tells his father he's living up north somewhere, with someone they don't know, and leaves it at that. He doesn't really think they deserve any more than that.

Remus pulls his boots back on when the light outside starts to fade and they both pad eagerly along the north trail, through the treeline and down the bank and past the ancient oak. The temple welcomes them back as it always does, all beating energy and pollen that glistens like gold dust in the late evening sun, and Sirius settles himself in the grass beside Remus as the night draws in and readies himself for the wild, luminous colours he knows are coming. It's still a thrill when they do; ferns glowing blue and lilac around them, the grass beneath them dusted with motes of iridescent purple and aquamarine, and the treeline alight with rushing veins of turquoise and brilliant, electric white. He feels Remus breathe in, and out, and that lazy, glittering haze floats up and away from them, drifting off into the night and fading from view before the sky erupts in that devastating watercolour of aurora, emerald and sapphire and magenta shimmering in great waves above them and picking out the gilt in Remus's eyelashes when Sirius turns his head to gaze at him through the grass.

"Are you happy?" Remus says softly, the dancing lights above them catching in his eyes; storms of colour in twin dark pools.

Sirius finds Remus's hand beside him, lacing their fingers together amongst the weeds, and he feels Remus squeeze his palm in return.

"I don't think there's anyone alive happier than I am, Remus," he murmurs.

He gets another magical grin from Remus at that, and then feels him moving, shifting over him to press his full lips against Sirius's in a deep, boundless kiss. There are hands on warm skin, electricity sparking between them as they find their way to each other as naturally and instinctively as they always do, and the aurora overhead shine brighter than ever when Remus sinks down onto him and whispers his name into the night.

And Sirius, laid out there in the ferns and the summer grasses at the foot at the ancient stone dais, can only hold him, and pull him closer still, and wonder at the rare and brilliant magic that finally brought him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! x


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